General Breast Health

There are many factors linked to breast cancer. The two most common are: being a woman and getting older. We’ve learned a lot about risk factors, but we still don’t understand what causes breast cancer to develop at a certain time in a certain person. It's likely a combination of factors. Although there are things you can do to manage your risk, no one has control over whether he or she gets breast cancer.

Breast cancer is often first suspected when a lump or a change in the breast is found. Or perhaps, an abnormal area was seen on your mammogram. Most of the time, these findings don’t turn out to be cancer. But the only way to know for sure is through follow-up tests. We offer several materials to help guide you through the journey ahead.

The goal of treating early breast cancer is to get rid of the cancer and keep it from coming back. Treatment for early breast cancer includes some combination of surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, hormone therapy and targeted therapy. These treatments are designed to remove the cancer from the breast and destroy any cancer that might still be in the body.

We have a series of Questions to Ask Your Doctor About Breast Cancer on a variety of breast cancer issues. You can print them and bring them with you to your next doctor's appointment. Plenty of space is provided to jot down the answers to the questions. This series is a valuable resource for women who have been recently diagnosed with breast cancer and who may be too overwhelmed to know where to start gathering information.